Cambria Palo Alto 2009

30+ Years of Custom Programming

Cambria Corporation. A Silicon Valley Custom Software Development Company since 1984 and providing Offshore Software Development in the Philippines.

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Cambria was founded 1984 in the Silicon Valley and is still there in Menlo Park. By 2006 we were getting increasing competition from overseas and decided to set up our own offshore software development company.

Our History

In 1984, John Geibel, Dick and Nancy Crewdson rented a room from Diurmuid McGuire in a little building at
636 Waverley Street in Palo Alto and began offering custom programming services to anyone in the Silicon Valley
who asked us. Diurmuid, who had a computer consulting company of his own, was a big help to us in getting
started. Our first project was a COBOL project for Roxy Rapp's shoe store and that got us launched. Dick read up on COBOL
over the weekend and did the small maintenance project the following week - our first and last venture
into the ancient world of mini computers.

636 and 640 Waverley Street, Palo alto. Cambria Home for 30 Years

Meanwhile Nancy mastered the use of DOS and dBase2 to start our programming
services in PC database programming which quickly became Cambria's main activity in the 1980s and continues to this day
after evolving through a succession of related specialties including FoxPro, Clipper, Visual FoxPro and Microsoft
Access. For most of the 1980s and early 1990s Nancy and her team mainly did FoxPro and then Visual FoxPro as DOS
gave way to Windows Programming. We wrote hundreds of programs for clients big and small but
culminating in a huge decade long project for Evapco Corporation. This period saw Cambria
All Star programmers Myrl Dunker, Helen Bernstein, Greg McCann and others join Cambria and Nancy to build this activity.

Early years of Cambria in California

While Nancy was building Cambria as a database programming company Dick worked largely in sales but also started
a separate activity using Turbo Pascal, C and C++. This started slowly and much of the effort was expended in building
the software that continues to be the basis of Cambria's internal systems to this day. But as Cambria attracted superb programmers
like John Watson, Sasha Smundik, and James Cerezo to work with Dick we began to get large significant projects to
suppliment our mainstream database programming.

Video Conf Project

In the picture you see Dick working on a project in the 1990s to create the software for Mitsubishi's line of
video conferencing products. Dick worked on the interface but it took Sasha to make the low level
software work with the undocumented hardware. With the success of this project we proceeded to do other major
projects for Mitsubishi which finally came to an end when the recession of 2001 caused them to pull back and eliminate
the departments of Mitsubishi America that was supporting this work.

Dick's Website 1996

Meanwhile ARPANET was turning into the Internet we know today and the next thing we knew was that people began
to ask us for Websites. We read up on HTML and in 1996 put up our first Cambria Website. As you see here this first effort was
pretty primitive, and for a few days I could not figure out how to get rid of that blue post on the left. But nobody
seemed to mind. Just getting something up, anything, was all that seemed to matter.

We had our ups and downs but these years were kind to us and over the 1990s we had expanded to the
point where we were able to purchase that building at 636 Waverley Street and for good measure purchased
the one next door at 640 Waverly Street to accommodate our growing staff.

Cambria Website 1997

Our problem now was one that early on seemed to be an advantage. We were in the Silicon Valley! We found ourselves competing with the likes of Apple, Google, and other major corporations for programming talent. It was not easy and we had to do something. What we did was to send James Bickley east to open a new office in Ardmore, PA in Greater Philadelphia where there was a wealth of great universities and colleges and the competition promised to be less intense. James surrounded himself with a new set
of great programmers like Ragini Yalamanchali, Kathy Fisher, Natalia Gabrielian, and designers Beth Sullivan and, later, Jess Carpenter. Our Palo Alto staff celebrated this event in 1999 by having a party dressed as revolutionary Philadelphians.

Catherine's Website 2000

Over the months since our first website we produced slight advances on Dick's website. We learned how to get rid of unwanted blue bands and to add pictures and interior pages. Our programmers even created sites for clients who seemed to like them. Then in the year 1999 we discovered that our clients began to want sites that showed artistic talent!

Catherine Jones (in Green in the above picture),a web designer looking for a job, knocked on our door at almost the moment that we had that epiphany and we hired her immediately to create the 2000 site you see here. It used Javascript and was a giant leap forward for us. In addition to advertising our new Ardmore office this site gave phone numbers in New York, where Catherine later moved and Kennebeck WA where Greg McCann relocated and began to work remotely. It was a shame to lose Catherine but we hired Donna Kwong in Palo Alto to replace her.

Donna's Website 2004

New designers have different ideas and when Catherine moved to New York we got another website, the 2004 site that you see here. We lived contentedly with modifications of that one for quite some time. By this time Cambria had weathered the 2001 recession but more and more we noticed that the major companies were going overseas to get their custom programming done.

Finally, in 2005, we decided to experiment with offshore programming ourselves. At first we looked for overseas partners but they were never there when needed so in 2006 we sent James Cerezo to Manila to hire a few programmers and see how that worked out. Our Manila office opened on January 5, 2007 with Jon Mora, Freddie Aujero and Dan Santor working for us and they worked out so well that we brought Richard Panopio, JM Gonzalez and Romeo Acidera on later that year*. Not so long after this Jenny Bacatio joined to whip us into shape and head up our sales effort. All in all our move to Makati was a resounding success and just in time for the 2008 recession that ultimately caused us to close our Ardmore office and shift most of our programming effort to our new Makati office.

Sherick's Website 2011

Styles change and our designers in Makati, Fred Aujero and Sherick Nones, decided that we needed a new look and created the 2011 site that you see here. At the time when we worked on it I was amazed at how fast these sites go out of date. The most recent version before the 2011 site talked about e-commerce as a trend in recent years but did not mention programming for mobile devices such as iPhones, iPads, Android Devices and the like which had begun to become so important to us.

Quite a bit has happened since 2011. We have completed the move of most of our programming effort from California and Philadelphia to Makati. So far as our websites are concerned Fred Aujero left us to emmigrate permanently to the USA after 8 years of designing websites for Cambria clients and Sherick left due to medical reasons. Now we have new designers in Makati and a new site. Meanwhile Google announced that starting April 2015 non-responsive websites will be penalized so far as SEO is concerned when viewed on mobile devices. Responsive means that the site will auto adjust as the size of the viewing screen changes. Clariza did a quick fix in May to make our 2011 site pass google's test but her fix was not one that could be easily maintained so a new site was needed.

Apple's Website 2016

Shown here is the first version of our newest website designed by Apple Ilagan. Our previous site was not so much out of date technically but the demand for responsive sites changed design styles so much that we simply looked badly dated - to a designer the worst sin of all. Apple kept most of the content intact but radically changed the interface to display, and promote, our main asset here at Cambria: Our superb staff of skilled programmers. I hope you like it. If you do, Apple and Clariza can do one for you.

* Jon stayed with us until 2014 when he went out on his own, Dan emigrated after a few years to Canada, and Fred was with us until this year when he emigrated to the USA. Richard and Romeo are still here and we have high hopes that JM, who emigrated to Canada a few months ago, will come back and join us once he gets a taste of a Canadian winter. Our staff here is extremely stable but the lure for talented professionals to move to North America is a strong one.

Unsolicited Testimonials

"I only wish I could put Cambria in charge of everything I'd like to do in life. Everyone I worked with at Cambria exceeded by an extraordinary degree my highest hopes for the website I asked them to create. Not only were they able to bring every aspect of the project to life exactly as I had envisioned it, but where needed, they made adjustments that significantly improved the website.

...I am delighted with the quality of work that Marvin, JM and Alicia have produced so far and certainly understand your desire to maintain the standard ...you have such a strong team and [with] clients vying for their time it is not something you should consider relinquishing.

I wanted to reach out to you and let you know about the performance Jon has done to-date regarding Silent Shield. I am very pleased with his coding and professionalism. He is very responsive in each request I've asked for and continues to provide very good code that is easy to follow and maintain. He has made his deliverables each time despite the week he was out. Great Job!